or add transmission_enable=YES to your /etc/rc.conf and run /usr/local/etc/rc.d/transmission start

There’s a few gotcha’s, though:

The settings file transmission uses lives in /usr/local/etc/transmission/home/settings.json. This file is overwritten by transmission on startup, so that isn’t the place to put your custom configurations. After doing a bit of reading of the rc script (/usr/local/etc/rc.d/transmission), I found out that the easiest way to configure transmission-daemon for your needs is editing your /etc/rc.conf and adding a transmission_flags var. This var is passed as parameters to transmission-daemon, so check out transmission-daemon --help for available options.

--paused makes sure the daemon is started, but all torrents are paused. You need to start the torrents manually by using either the web interface (running at port 9091 by default) or using the transmission-remote command line utility

I have created the necessary files and folders with the transmission user and group as the owner. As root: